Is There a Future for Recovery?

Recovery has became a hot topic in every contemporary discussion about Psychosocial Rehabilitación. The concept has been exhaustively discussed in its meaning, and its implications for services. "Recovery oriented" services are a new way of assessment of services and the "recovery orientation" has become the official framework in which many leading organizations work and promote, including WHO.

On the other side, some remain skeptical and wonder whether it is "old wine in new bottles".

We have asked Larry Davidson , a leading opinion on this topic,  a reflection on this topic and he has agreed to deliver a lecture in Madrid 2018.

Larry Davidson. Yale University.

This is the summary has sent us as summary.

"This presentation begins with and reflects on the implications of the statement made by William Anthony, a leading champion of mental health recovery, that “No one would be considered too blind to learn Braille.” We begin with recognition that the mental health field is currently operating with two distinctly different meanings of the concept of “recovery”.

While the traditional, clinical sense of having recovered from a serious mental illness has been around since the 18th century, the more recent meaning of living a full, self-directed life with an on-going mental illness emerged from the international Mental Health Consumer/Survivor Movement in the late 1980s.

Based on a disability rights framework, this new meaning of recovery has since spawned a movement of its own, promising to push mental health services beyond symptom reduction to a restoration of functioning and community inclusion in the face of a psychiatric disability. This new meaning of recovery is in danger at the present time, however, of being dismissed either as solely the person’s own responsibility and/or as having no relevance to mental health care.

This presentation argues for complementarity between the two meanings of recovery and for preserving a viable role for “personal recovery” by incorporating the social determinants of mental health in efforts to creating more supportive and inclusive communities, comprising an interface between the concepts of personal recovery and citizenship.
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Larry Davidson, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychiatry
Director, Program for Recovery and Community Health
School of Medicine and Institution for Social and Policy Studies
Yale University.